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April 23, 2010
Book 'em
Recorders' Book, originally uploaded by snoopoz.
One of the cases I'm working on involves an argument between a bunch of rich dudes. I can't go into specifics, obviously, but part of this requires me to comb through old records at the Cook County Recorder of Deeds, where I am trying to locate certain deeds executed in the 1910's and 20's which contain restrictions that are binding on the property owners today. Get it?
That picture is a page from one of the books I am using. These books are very hard to read, and quite nonsensical at first glance. I've been working on this for a few weeks, and I still have no clue what is going on half the time.
However, the best part of all this is also these old books. One of my favorite things is to look at old handwriting. I have long envied Abraham Lincoln's handwriting. Its flow, the swoops, the curves. It might be extreme to call it majestic, but that's what I really think.
My handwriting is notoriously bad, has been for years. It's a mish-mash of cursive and printing, often illegible. I am proud of my 7's, though. I am one of those jerkwads who puts a dash through his 7's, and although some people complain, I am not going to change. It's my thing, man.
Obviously, handwriting is not as important as it used to be, now that we all use computers and text messages and voicemail. But looking through the same few pages of that book, it is interesting to see the way people wrote in the 1920's, and how the handwriting changed up until 1985, when all the records became computerized.
Now, this is not to say everyone in the 20's had pristine handwriting. There are quite a few bits in there which are simply unreadable, leading to some headaches for me where I tried to decode what exactly the writing was supposed to mean. All I can say is this - if you are going to write something in a book that is going to be used 100 years later, make your writing legible!
This goes for people nowadays. I was horrified to learn that the Twitter Archives have been handed over to historians, because this means some idiot doing a research paper on life at the turn of the 21st century is going to be combing Twitter and find something like this.
@jason696969 lolz cant bleave u sed dat 2 her! lol lol lol 4realz? ima c u l8r @ n8's.
To borrow another colloquialism, that guy will probably say "wtf." That's why, in all my online communiques, I strive to maintain proper English. Yes, I toss in a few abbreviations here and there, but I'll be damned if anyone is every going to find correspondence by me where I use "u" and "4" as words. Of course, by that time, we will obviously have neural transmitters which translate our thoughts into words, totally destroying the need for a silly thing like a keyboard.
Speaking of which, I'm on Twitter, and have been for more than a year. Follow me!
entry no. 1433
Posted at April 23, 2010 04:29 PM
Comments
Nice blog
Posted by: Christy at April 24, 2010 02:26 PM